A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
ALAN PERLISYou’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
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Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
ALAN PERLIS